The present invention relates to a speech translation device and a computer readable medium, and more particularly to a speech translation device that leads the user's utterance, suitable for use in a portable translator for overseas travel or the like, and a recording medium for implementing the same.
Conventional translation devices are generally classified into two types. A first type of translation device is a device which translates an arbitrarily inputted sentence (hereinafter referred to as the “machine translation device”), and a second type of translator device is a device which searches previously prepared bilingual examples stored therein in accordance with a specific situation or a keyword to translate retrieved examples (hereinafter referred to as the “table look-up translation device”).
As the first machine translation device, a number of text-based machine translation systems have already been used in practice. A translation method widely employed by these translation systems is a rule-based translation which translates based on a dictionary and grammatical rules. However, investigations have also been made on an example-based translation which utilizes examples since the rule-based translation encounters difficulties in describing a rule when it is fed with new sentence expressions (linguistic phenomena) which cannot be handled satisfactorily with grammatical rules.
On the other hand, a speech-based translation device has a problem in that a correct translation result is not provided unless speech recognition is correctly performed anyway. To solve this problem, JP-A-8-328585, for example, shows a method which calculates linguistic similarities between an inputted speech and all examples contained in an example database to select the most likely solution from a plurality of candidates resulting from the speech recognition.
As the second table look-up translation device, JP-A-56-88564, for example, describes a portable translation device which responds to a category specified by the user to display relevant examples, and then accepts a sentence selected by the user from the displayed examples to audibly output a translation of the selected sentence.